Layers

I was out walking through downtown Nanaimo looking for ways to introduce depth into a two dimensional image, looking for images that pulled the eye into the frame.  I am drawn to subjects that speak of urban decay, of a place that had once been brimming with life and energy but now was left only a shell.  I came across this window that wrapped around a triangular shaped building that was partly covered with paper left after the tenant moved out.  This image brought both of these things together. The portion of the window that was covered reflected the street behind me, I could see through the middle section of the window, to the street on the other side but the second window picked up more reflections at a different angle.  It all worked together to give about 6 different views of the street behind me and the street in front of me.  I had to work hard to find the right position so that I would not become part of the image.  I really like the way that the layers of glass produced and almost double exposure effect for portions of the frame.  There is a lot of see in this image but I am especially drawn to the way that the street light pole is repeated in a shadowy reflection and the vague idea of a person in the deep background.

Looking down into the pillared entry of a courtyard. Canon EOS 7D Mk. II EF 50mm f/1.4 at f/1.6 1/80 ISO 250

Earlier that same grey morning I had come across this location and I really had to hunt to find the right angle from which to shoot it.  It is near the China Steps in Nanaimo and getting above the arches gave them a more interesting appearance.  I leaned against the wall in the extreme right of the frame to anchor the image.  I used an extremely large aperture, f/1.6, to push the wall out of focus and dark out of focus portion of the right side of the frame provides a contrast to the crisp shapes of the arches and brick patio and fence beyond.  The light and the light coloured tiles pull the eye deep into the frame, away from the dark anchor on the left.  I also darkened the edges of the frame and lightened the centre portion of the arches so that your eye would be pulled deep into the centre of the frame both by what’s in focus, and by where the light is. Finding ways to introduce depth into, what essentially is, a flat medium can really add interest to your photographs.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Fixing The Window

I stood in the parking lot of a 7-11 looking at this house.  I had been out driving around looking for interesting images and this house grabbed my eye, I had done a u-turn at the next intersectionand now I had to figure out how to make the image.  I felt as though the house needed to have a very straightforward angle, nothing fancy, so I chose to shoot it straight on, so the viewer could only see the front wall of the house.  It felt almost as though this is what would have been drawn in the set director’s sketchbook when the scene from the movie called for a rundown house with some character so I wanted it to look, as much as possible like a facade so I shot it straight on.  I was also pretty sure that I wanted to end up with a square frame, I felt that it fit the visual language of the house so now I just had to choose which side of the house put on the edge of the frame.  The rather lifeless looking tree on the right side, fit into the frame better than the spruce trees on the left and they added to the mood and tone that already existed in the house.  I was also pretty sure, right from the start that the house needed to be slightly off-centre so all of these ideas came together in the composition that you see here.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Paul leaned forward on the ladder his position, somewhat precarious.  He felt the old gutter pipe bend and give a little more as he leaned forward.  The stairwell window had been leaking and there was now a brown stain on the plaster on the the inside wall.  He had watched the stain grow every time he climbed the stairs to his room over the last two months.  He had noticed it when it was just a small semi-circle under the moulding around the window but now it was overlapping layers of brown streaks running from the edge of the window to the floor.  In some ways it had marked the passage of time in his life better than the calendar, better than the schedule at his job assembling fences at construction sites, better than the mounting number of days that had passed since he had last spoken to his father.  But now, now it was time to fix it, now it was time to put a fresh layer of caulk around each pane.  This might stop the water from making the stain grow, but it wouldn’t stop the unending rows of construction fencing and it for sure would not make his father pick up the phone.  But… it would stop the leak.

A Tree in Lorien

I know the Mallorn tree in Tolkien’s Lothlorien is supposed to have leaves of gold but the bark is a silvery grey and when I saw this tree in Butchart Gardens lit through a small hole in the clouds it made me wander if Sam and Frodo might not have taken shelter under it’s branches.  The tree was covered in droplets of water from the rain the night before and it held the light beautifully.  I did darken the area around the top and top right of the tree to emphasize the contrast between the tree and the background but the fact that I underexposed the shot by one stop meant that the light that was hitting the water droplets on the tree became the dominant light source in the frame and gave the image more punch.  I was very happy with the mood that the picture evokes and the story that it begins to tell.  I was looking for non-traditional images of Butchart Gardens and I think I succeeded in that here.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Sometimes You're Just Lucky

My wife and I took my parents to Butchart Gardens a few weeks ago and I had been struggling with whether to keep my 18-55mm or my 70-200mm on my camera.  I know that very few people would consider a 70-200mm 2.8 a ‘walking around a garden’ lens but it really suits my style and I find better photographs with that lens on my camera.  I guess it helps with Cartier-Bresson’s dictum on how to make a photo better, “Get closer!”  Anyway I kept the 70-200 on and am I ever glad I did.  When I got this photo I was taking a closeup of these pink flowers just over to the right and I heard my dad say, “Look a hummingbird.” I swung quickly to my left to see this little bird feeding in the pink camellia? I got several of it with its beak in the flower and its back to me and then it backed out, I kept snapping as it flew away and I was lucky enough to get one as it flew directly in front of the flower.  The flower, the plant, and deep blue sky blurred into a pleasing but contextual background because I was at 2.8 and shooting at 200mm.  I got lucky.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Building A Nest

Here is the image before I retouched the distracting branches.

We often have hummingbirds in our yard and this spring I noticed that they were building a nest right next to our deck.  Catching a hummingbird in flight is an exercise in patience.  They move so quickly in and out that it can present a significant challenge to timing it just right.  Having a camera that can fire off 10 frames per second is a definite advantage.  The other issue was all of the foliage and branches that were in the way.  I found it worked best to put my camera on a tripod, focus manually and then fire away whenever the bird arrived.  Other wise the autofocus would sometimes focus on the branches which were between the camera and the nest.  An effective 400mm focal length, (using a 2x extender on my 200mm lens), will blur out a lot of the intervening branches but I had to use the clone tool to get rid of a few of them.  You can see them in the version of the photo to the right and will also notice that my cloning skills are not great.  Anyway, I was still happy with the image.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com